Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Reviews in caa.reviews are published continuously by CAA and Taylor & Francis, with the most recently published reviews listed below. Browse reviews based on geographic region, period or cultural sphere, or specialty (from 1998 to the present) using Review Categories in the sidebar or by entering terms in the search bar above.

Recently Published Reviews

Pamela Karimi
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 452 pp. Paper $35.00 (9781503631809)
In Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practices, Pamela Karimi explores a wide spectrum of contemporary artistic practices in Iran from 1980 to the present day that engage with diverse urban and natural sites, with a particular emphasis on Tehran, Iran’s capital city. These spatial artistic practices range from graffiti and architectural design projects to Gesamtkunstwerk installations in dilapidated buildings, ephemeral performances in remote mountains or in prominent urban spots, choreographies for a trusted group of audience members, theatrical pieces staged in unconventional settings such as taxis, and interventionist strategies within gallery spaces. Previous scholarly works investigating the… Full Review
October 30, 2023
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Sophie Lynford
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2022. 264 pp.; 112 color ills. Cloth $65.00 ( 9780691231914)
Sophie Lynford’s Painting Dissent: Art, Ethics, and the American Pre-Raphaelites is a landmark contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century American art. Using the work of seven key figures to trace the rise, development, and afterlife of the American Pre-Raphaelite movement, Painting Dissent offers a newly comprehensive account of a significant but understudied group that shook up American landscape practice, aesthetic thought, and many other cultural endeavors in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one of the great contributions of Lynford’s book is its account of the multidisciplinary dynamics of the American Pre-Raphaelite project. Painting Dissent examines architects and scientists… Full Review
October 25, 2023
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Andrew Dewdney
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 240 pp.; 0 color ills.; 25 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9781912685820)
In Forget Photography, Andrew Dewdney calls on scholars to stop using photography theory to understand digital images and the visual cultures they characterize. Made with pixels, circulated by data algorithms and social networks, the computational images that suffuse contemporary life require, in Dewdney’s words: “A more productive discourse in which the hybridity of the networked image, inequality, racism and climate change stand at the centre of concern” (12). It is an expansive, necessary, and difficult goal. Aiming to clear space for this more productive discourse, Forget Photography consigns photography to the past: “The analogue photograph, the world to which… Full Review
October 23, 2023
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April 23–September 24, 2023, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Women Defining Women in Contemporary Art of the Middle East and Beyond, curated by Linda Komaroff at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), brings together an international roster of forty-two women artists who, as the opening wall text describes them, “were born or live in what can broadly be termed Islamic societies or associated diaspora communities.” The exhibition joins several other exhibitions over the past two decades or so that focus on the contemporary art production of women from the Islamic world, such as Breaking the Veils: Women Artists from the Islamic World (2002), She… Full Review
October 18, 2023
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Gillian B. Elliott and Anne Heath, eds.
Series: Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Volume: 18. Leiden: Brill, 2022. 482 pp. Hardback (9789004506961)
In Art, Architecture, and the Moving Viewer, c. 300–1500 CE: Unfolding Narratives, Gillian Elliott and Anne Heath have assembled an excellent collection of essays that considers how medieval spaces and image programs mutably engaged their viewers. While studies of movement through medieval spaces abound, the richly illustrated volume places important emphasis on temporal considerations that play out in the idea of “unfolding narratives.” Indeed, it is this provocative phrase, more than the title’s “moving viewer,” that best signposts the volume’s center of gravity and contribution to the field. The editors’ coauthored introduction begins with the example of the early… Full Review
October 16, 2023
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Kobena Mercer
Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African & African American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 240 pp.; 48 color ills.; 72 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300247268)
Alain Locke and the Visual Arts takes a deep critical dive into Alain Locke’s significant contributions to African American and Black diasporic visual culture through critical analysis of his cross-cultural and philosophical writings of the 1930s and 1940s. In his introductory chapter, Mercer establishes Locke as philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement, and as a public intellectual interested in social change in the pluralistic forging of African American identity via cultural pursuits such as art, literature, music, and theater. Mercer dissects Locke’s intercultural approach to the visual arts, reminding the reader that he was foremost a… Full Review
October 11, 2023
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Patricio del Real
New Haven and London: Yale Universtiy Press, 2022. 320 pp.; 33 color ills.; 69 b/w ills. Hardcover $65.00 (9780300254563)
In recent years, architectural history has seen a sizeable growth in research focusing on the built environments of Latin America. Architecture, architects, and increasingly systems and institutions from this area of the so-called “Global South” have been brought to light, analyzed, and given critical attention to the point of shifting the supposed centers and axes of “canonical” modernity. Patricio del Real’s recent book, Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art is a most welcome addition to this expanding body of scholarship.  To be sure, this book can be categorized in a variety of manners… Full Review
October 10, 2023
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Mechtild Widrich
Rethinking Art's Histories. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023. 256 pp. Paperback £25.00 (9781526168115)
Mechtild Widrich’s new book offers an argument and a demonstration: To engage with public art today—whether in a scholarly or a public forum—requires a “multidirectional method” attentive to how, within a single site, “multiple historical references reinforce one another and build connections” (14). Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art presents a significant intervention in the art history of public art that makes site-specificity its key term. The book is also a bold contribution to contemporary debates about monument activism. Widrich emphasizes that Monumental Cares is the product of both “research and public engagement” (15)—she is, amongst other public-facing… Full Review
October 4, 2023
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Mark Staff Brandl
New York: Bloomsbury, 2023. 240 pp.; 21 b/w ills. $115.00 (9781350073838)
A worthy contribution in the still-growing efforts to de-silo theory from practice in writing and teaching about contemporary art, Mark Staff Brandl’s A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art is approachable and informal while being specific and sincere, and a tonal success for the way it loosens up and shakes out the rhetoric, jargon, and tropes common to so much scholarly writing about art. Visual tropes and metaphors (as opposed to literary ones) are central protagonists in Brandl’s philosophy of art, and they anchor his major propositions about the mechanics of visual communication and interpretation. They are not glib… Full Review
October 2, 2023
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Maria Stavrinaki
Trans Jane Marie Todd Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 448 pp.; 78 b/w ills. Hardcover $35.00 (9781942130659 )
In 2007 a popular science book was published, The World without Us, that considered how long it would take for the signs of civilisation to disappear if, by some instantaneous cataclysm, all living humans suddenly vanished. The author, Alan Weisman, suggested that after a few centuries, nature would have reclaimed nearly everything, and then went on to speculate about a distant future in which all human history would be reduced to a layer, just a centimetre or so deep, in the geological record. The book was one of many that have shown a fascination with civilizational apocalypse, motivated by… Full Review
September 27, 2023
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Jennifer Gross, ed.
Exh. cat. Princeton, NJ: 232 pp.; 173 color ills.; 65 b/w ills. Cloth $49.95 (9780691239842)
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, April 6–September 17, 2023
“The flux of life,” wrote Mina Loy in a letter published in The Transatlantic Review in 1924, “is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears—and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. Modernism says: why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory everyday life?” (23). The sublime hidden in the everyday, openness to chance and intuition, the democratization of art—all these served… Full Review
September 26, 2023
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Sarah-Neel Smith
Berkeley, CA: University of Califoria Press, 2022. 232 pp.; 42 color ills.; 20 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780520383418)
Formal analysis and interpretation of artworks often consider art funding trivial compared to historical and social background, especially in societies where art funding is sparse. Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey focuses on this subordinate, if not often-overlooked aspect of art creation and cultural production. Proposing economy as a crucial metric to production, Smith analyzes the art scene in 1950s Turkey by focusing on two galleries and several influential artists of the time, while giving an overview of social, political, and economic exchange between the United States and Turkey. In doing so, Smith exemplifies recent… Full Review
September 21, 2023
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Sara Blaylock
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023. 328 pp.; 81 b/w ills. $34.95 (9780262046633)
Scholarship about art and culture in the 1980s Central European socialist bloc often evinces a certain impatience motivated by hindsight. Simply put, we know what is coming to Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in 1989. As a result, inquiry is approached through the lens of the imminent political change and sets as its task the diagnosis of the terminal symptoms preceding these events. In Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany, Sara Blaylock, associate professor of art history at University of Minnesota Duluth, invites us to slow down and approach this era outside this teleological frame. By engaging… Full Review
September 18, 2023
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Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, January 6–May 28, 2023
Although fin-de-siècle Vienna is often thought of as having been strictly Austrian, it is worth remembering that Vienna was one of two capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Divided between the dual monarchy of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary, the empire’s borders extended from parts of modern-day Italy and Croatia to Romania and Ukraine. Fabricating Empire: Folk Textiles and the Making of Early 20th-Century Austrian Design, the small yet impactful exhibition curated by Genevieve Cortinovis at the St. Louis Art Museum, provides a hearty challenge to Austrian-centric historiography. Rather than refute Vienna’s importance, the exhibition situates it… Full Review
September 13, 2023
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Perrin Stein, ed.
Exh. cat. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale Universtiy Press, 2022. 308 pp.; 242 ills. Cloth $65.00 (9781588397461)
Few artists have been as profoundly involved in their political milieu as Jacques Louis David. In this regard, the subtitle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of the artist’s drawings—“Radical Draftsman”—makes perfect sense. Indeed, its signature image, The Oath of the Tennis Court, shows David at the zenith of his artistic service to the nascent republic: members of the Third Estate unite in the highly finished study, which he displayed at the Salon of 1791 to inspire citizens to fund an ambitious painting, one he ultimately never completed. Less triumphant proof of the artist’s embroilment in the French… Full Review
September 11, 2023
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